Yale and Gilead Sciences Sign $40 Million Pact in Search for Cancer Drugs

By Ron Winslow

Gilead, known mostly for its line of medicines for HIV/AIDS, will pay $40 million for a four-year effort that could be extended to 10 years and a total of $100 million as part of its plan to expand its product portfolio to include cancer. It plans to tap Yale’s expertise in oncology, genomics and clinical medicine in a bid to discover new drug targets and design molecules to hit them.

In the past year, the company has acquired three smaller firms with compounds for cancer and inflammatory diseases in early stage development. The Yale pact “is another piece of the puzzle,” Howard Jaffe, president of the Gilead Foundation, tells the Health Blog.

The initiative will be led by Joseph “Yossi” Schlessinger, director of Yale’s Cancer Biology Institute, whose history of success in drug development was a draw for Gilead. Schlessinger has helped found three companies, including Sugen, now owned by Pfizer, and Plexxikon, whose promising experimental drug for advanced melanoma led Daiichi Sankyo of Japan to agree to acquire it in February for $805 million plus as much as $130 million in milestone payments.

Schlessinger tells the Blog that cheap genetic sequencing is driving an explosion of discovery of new mutations, including those that can cause cells to become cancerous. He will lead a six person committee – three from Yale and three from Gilead – that aims to link mutations to specific cancers with the hope of findings promising targets for new drugs.

“It sounds easy,” he says. “It’s not so easy. But if this would bring one or two new drugs, it [would be] well accomplished.”

Yale’s Richard Lifton, who head’s the university’s Center for Genomic Analysis, and Thomas Lynch, director of the Cancer Center, are also participating in the venture. Gilead will have first option to license any promising discoveries the effort produces.

Sanofi-aventis recently announced plans for a research collaboration with University of California, San Francisco; Pfizer has linked up with UCSF and researchers from seven major academic research centers in New York. Merck and Roche’s Genentech unit are among other drug companies that recently established new ties with industry.